


Like a dying dog on its last legs

by AvaTaggart



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Gen, Human Sacrifice, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-05-04 06:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14586978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvaTaggart/pseuds/AvaTaggart
Summary: Thomas Connor was a practical, hands-on kind of guy. Someone had to stop Joey Drew's reign of terror over the Studio, and it might as well be him. He wasn't about to let being turned into a cartoon wolf and locked in the hellish basement of Joey Drew Studios stop him. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a lot easier said than done.My take on the backstory of Joey Drew Studios' repairman, Thomas Connor, following him from his first time working for the Studio to his appearance in chapter four. A 'Thomas Connor is Tom' fic.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So.... Thomas Connor........Tom......  
> Law of conservation of characters; there's no way they're not the same person  
> This fic just gets him from point "A" to point "end of chapter 4"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATED 5/11 because I was able to play Chapter 1 post-update and they changed the pallet at the edge of the Ink Machine pit to one of those tables scattered around the Studio, so I did too

Thomas Connor had worked in a _lot_ of shoddy buildings. It was pretty much a part of the job description, at this point; if one thing in the place needed fixing, it probably wasn’t alone in that, and so Thomas had worked around rotting ceiling tile and faulty electrical wiring and all sorts of other things.

But Joey Drew Studios was a whole ‘nother story.

Thomas would be hard-pressed to find something _right_ with the building, honestly. The wood of the walls and floor was haphazard, boards loose and at angles, holes beginning to peek through. The lights flickered, the ventilation sputtered, and on top of that the whole place was _depressing_. He’d figured a place where they drew cartoons would be cheery, but Joey Drew Studios was more like an extra-large coffin, waiting for you to die so it could swallow you up.

But by far the worst were the pipes. There were probably miles of them in the building, all the cheapest grade metal sloppily painted, joints barely screwed together. The janitor, Wally Franks, took him on a tour to see the problem areas where leaks often sprung, and it was a _long_ one. Seemed the pipes couldn’t go twenty feet without bursting, and Thomas wasn’t surprised; he wouldn’t trust these pipes to carry a calm flow of water, let alone the fast streams of thick, goopy ink. If it was up to him, he’d tear the whole system out and replace it, save the time and money in the long run.

It wasn’t his call, though, and he’d been hired to fix the pipes, not replace them. He did his best to tighten the joints, add in drains to reduce the flow where it was most prone to bursting pipes, and seal up the cracks with duct tape. It wasn’t quite good enough for Mr. Drew, who wanted the system working perfectly, but he conceded that this was probably as good as it would get and forked over the cost of repairs.

Thomas went home at the end of three days of repairs, and when he tried to wash the ink out of his work clothes in the sink, it seemed it would never come out, black running out of his clothes for an hour before he shut the water off. He swore he’d never go back to work for the Studio again.

* * *

He went back.

Times were tough, and while the work at the Studio was hard and messy, it was _work_ , and it paid. Mr. Drew begged him, said three other handymen had refused to work for them, offered to pay extra, and Thomas _needed_ the money, so he did it.

The pipes, always, every week, needed patching and bolting and replacing and fixing, but there was a lot else around the Studio to fix. The elevator, the one that creaked its way up and down, down, down, deeper than Thomas thought an animation studio had any business building, sometimes got stuck between floors, or dropped down a few feet. This set of stairs or that one was always on the verge of giving way. The wiring for the lights failed now and again.

Somewhere along the way, Thomas became something of the Studio’s unofficial handyman. It wasn’t always Joey calling him in anymore; sometimes it was Wally, sometimes it was just a random employee who’d noticed a leak. Mr. Drew tried to talk him into signing an exclusive contract with the Studio at least once a week, but while the Studio _was_ his most lucrative client, it wasn’t his only one. He could go elsewhere, if he wanted; Mr. Drew couldn’t find another handyman to hire.

And Thomas needed that chance to leave even more than he needed the money. The Studio gave him all kinds of bad feelings. It seemed emptier, more cavernous every day. He knew, or at least he told himself he knew, that it was just because Mr. Drew was starting to lay people off. He couldn’t support a workforce so big in this economy, so there were less people to fill the endless hallways and rooms.

But still, it felt like the place was growing.

Thomas was packing up his tools to leave on a Thursday evening when Mr. Drew approached him. The studio owner’s health seemed to be declining lately, and he’d taken to walking around with a cane he leaned on quite heavily--one more reason not to promise himself to the Studio, since Joey was the only one keeping this place together.

“Thomas!” he said. “Just the man I wanted to see!”

“I’m just on my way out, Mr. Drew,” Thomas replied. “So I hope you wanted to see me to wish me goodbye for the day.”

“Ah, I wish that was the case!” Joey bemoaned, slinging his free arm around Thomas’s shoulders. “There’s a problem with the gearbox that lifts the Ink Machine, and you’re the only one that can fix it. Wall’s out sick today, and I’d do it myself but these joints aren’t what they used to be, y’know?” Joey chuckled at that, while Thomas tried to slip out of his surprisingly strong grip.

“I’m sure I can fix it in the morning, Mr. Drew,” Thomas said.

“Oh, that won’t do at all!” Joey said. “The tension it’s putting on the chains, I’m afraid one is gonna snap! What a mess that’d be, you know? I’m sure you can figure it out real quick, just enough to take the strain off the chains.”

Thomas sighed. He knew that if the Ink Machine really did fall, he’d be the one to have to fix it (and the pipes it’d throw off, and the floors it’d smash, and… everything really). An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, right?

“I’ll take a look, then,” he said reluctantly. Joey squeezed his shoulder and then released him.

“Thank you, Thomas! You’re a lifesaver, you know!”

Joey led the way back down to the mechanic’s access door to the Ink Machine. Thomas had only been here a couple times, checking and reinforcing the connections between the Ink Machine and the rest of the pipe system. The Machine itself gave him the creeps; it was too big, too heavy, too mysterious. Thomas liked knowing how things worked, and Joey had been tight-lipped about how the Ink Machine worked, or even what it did! Thomas could figure that it made ink, but he had no idea _how_ , and he didn’t like that.

As they walked into the room, Thomas could sure enough see the large gears that lifted the Ink Machine by its chains struggling to move but not really spinning. The Ink Machine itself was just short of its fully raised position, swaying slightly as the chains tried to raise it and failed.

Thomas hit the stop button for the machine, and once the gears stopped trying to move, he took a closer look. Maybe they needed lubrication, or a cog had fallen out of place, or-

There was something wedged into the gears. Thomas reached in between the now-stilled gears and pulled out what looked to be a plush toy of the Studio’s wolf character--Barrus? Thomas wasn’t all that familiar with the actual cartoons the Studio made, and besides, the plush was chewed half to hell by the gears.

Once it looked like he’d gotten all the pieces out, Thomas hit the stop switch again, and the Ink Machine rose back into its fully raised position and came to a smooth stop.

“Well, that looks fixed,” Thomas said, beginning to turn around. “No Idea how this got-”

But he didn’t finish the sentence. Behind him, Joey Drew stood of his own power, holding his heavy wooden cane almost like a baseball bat. Without hesitation, he swung it at Thomas, and the world went black.

* * *

Thomas came to slowly, waves of light and blackness interspersed. It felt like he was splayed out on the wooden floor, and his head ached like he’d been hit by a truck. Ugh, had a bolt flown out of some over-pressured pipe and hit him in the head?

As the world stopped spinning, Thomas was able to take in his surroundings. He was, indeed, lying on the floor, right next to the Ink Machine, it seemed. He tried to sit up, to press his hands to his head and figure out what had hit him, but he couldn’t. His wrists, and ankles, were pinned to the floor, tied down with what Thomas could see was rope if he angled his head right.

“What the hell?” he said, thinking he was talking to himself.

“Now, now, watch that language,” came a familiar voice. “It’d be a shame to go out on such a foul note, wouldn’t it?”

And off to the side, where Thomas could barely see him, was Joey Drew. His cane was nowhere to be seen, and with a wince Thomas remembered that the studio owner had used it to knock him unconscious, rather crudely if he was honest.

“What do you think you’re doing, Drew?” Thomas demanded, and then he actually processed Joey’s words and felt his blood run cold. “What do you mean, go out?”

“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out!” Joey said, showman persona in full swing. “The unknown is only unknown until you try it, you know! So we’re going to try something new! You won’t die, most likely, though I can’t say it’ll be _pleasant_ , exactly.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Drew!” Thomas cried. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Look around, Thomas. This isn’t an animation studio like any other. I’m going to bring cartoons in an entirely new direction! Change the industry--no, the world! And lucky you, you get to help!”

At Joey’s prompting, Thomas _did_ look around, trying to find a way to escape. He was tied to a weird wooden table at the edge of the Ink Machine’s pit, near the spout. His hands and feet were tied down with rope, though the ties on his left hand looked loose--maybe he could get his arm free?

More worryingly, he could see lines of ink drawing unfamiliar symbols all around him. On the floor underneath the table, he could just make out the swoop of a circle big enough to contain his whole body. There were various items scattered around the symbols on the floor. Thomas shuddered to see a strikingly human bone positioned by his right hand, but there were more innocent items too: an undamaged wolf plush toy, a can of that blasted bacon soup, a poster for one of the cartoons (Boris the Wolf in Sheep Songs, so _that_ was the wolf’s name). Lit candles cast wavering light over the patchwork of benign and occult, and Thomas wasn’t sure if he should fear for his life or start laughing at the absurdity.

Then Joey began some kind of chanting, and the Ink Machine began creaking in a rather ominous way, and Thomas settled on fear. He tried wiggling his left hand free of its bindings, but that didn’t work; a glance showed Joey preoccupied reading out from his book, so Thomas instead tried bending his hand around enough to pick at the knot in the rope. It was slow going, but he was sure it was loosening-

And then Joey hit a switch, and the ink came.

Thomas had never seen the Ink Machine running at full tilt; at most it had released a drizzle from its main nozzle, which was bafflingly huge. Now, though, the Machine was making full use of that nozzle, blasting ink out with such force it flew out instead of straight down. Thomas flinched as it hit him, heavy and forceful and shockingly cold, and tried to find the ties on the rope despite being blinded by the black spray. He _had_ to undo the tie, to get free of this before Joey killed him!

It wasn’t long before Thomas noticed the ink wasn’t draining off the table. No, it was building up, staying contained inside where Thomas guessed the outside perimeter of the drawn circle had been. Was Joey intending to drown him in this? His picking at the rope increased with frantic haste, and he no longer cared if Joey noticed. He couldn’t just lay down and die here!

But his fingers were starting to feel numb. All of him, actually, and he hoped it was from how cold the ink was, and not the beginnings of death. Frantically, Thomas thrashed against his ties, fighting to get free as the ink rose, and rose, and finally submerged him.

Numbness became needle pricks became burning, melting, feeling like his whole body was falling to pieces. Thomas screamed, and the ink rushed into his mouth, his lungs, coating his insides. He could feel his body twisting and breaking and reforming, and he _had_ to be dead now, dead and in hell, because there was no way he could _survive_ something like this.

With a jolt, Thomas managed to pull his hand free, the rope burn nothing compared to the pain he was already feeling. He frantically reached back, hoping to tip the table off-balance, to break the circle and let the ink drain, _anything_.

His fingers hit dry air, and the pain in them stopped. He could tell _exactly_ where the edge of the circle was, halfway up his forearm where the feeling of pain stopped and he could feel air instead of sticky ink against his skin. He tried to pull his arm further out, desperate for any relief from the pain.

There was a rod, Joey’s cane maybe, smacking into his hand. With a sharp crack, it knocked his hand back into the circle, still thankfully numb and painless. Thomas lost his train of thought, and everything was pain and blackness and _ink_.

And then something glowed golden, and the ink began to drain. The pain stopped, though Thomas’s body felt tingly, alien, _wrong._ He sputtered for breath on the now-drained table. How had he not drowned?

He could hear Joey’s voice from somewhere.

“A shame you pulled that stunt. You were almost perfect, you know,” Joey said.

“Fuck you,” Thomas snarled with all the energy he could muster.

“Well, maybe not as perfect as I thought. Oh, well, I’ll just have to try again.”

The table Thomas was on was lifting--no, tilting, bringing Thomas closer to an upright position. There was a ratcheting noise as it kept tilting, a pull at his still-secured wrist and ankles as his weight hung against the rope, and a view that made Thomas’s insides lurch.

 _Oh._ He was at the edge of the pit.

Thomas wasn’t sure where exactly Joey got the knife, but it was sharp. It sliced through the ties at his ankles before he knew it, and cut the tie on his right wrist just as his left hand grabbed the loose rope that had been securing it. Thomas hung above the abyss,, clinging with still-numb fingers to the ink-slick rope.

Joey scowled, and aimed the knife not at the rope this time, but at Thomas’s arm, and he was falling.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's up, I'm not dead! sorry for the radio silence, i got a new job and have been pretty busy, and this chapter fought me a bunch  
> i'd love to have this fic finished by the chapter 5 release but that's probably not happening, oh well, hope you enjoy this anyway!

Thomas came back to consciousness somewhere he didn’t recognize.

The wood panelling, the shitty lighting, it all looked like the Studio, but this was a part he’d never seen himself. The pipes running along the edges of the room were leaking ink that stained the walls--yeah, he’d definitely never been here before. There was something weird at the bottom of his field of vision, too, some kind of blurry white thing stuck to his face. Was this some kind of prank from Wally or one of the other guys? Knock Thomas out and mess with him?

“Real fuckin’ funny, guys,” Thomas growled, pushing himself back up to a sitting position. Ugh, his whole body felt weird, tingly with a dull ache in his bones--what had the guys done to him? He raised his right hand to at least brush the whatever-it-was off his face--

Since when did he wear gloves?

Instead of the calluses and ink stains he’d grown accustomed to seeing on his hand, there was a spotless white glove. A warning bell went off in Thomas’s head, and he tried to brush the feeling of panic aside; after all, this was strange, but it was just a glove, right?

Except as he turned his hand over to get a better look at the glove, he happened to count the fingers.

_ One, two, three--where’s the fourth one? _

He wiggled his fingers, and sure enough, only felt three move, the fourth gone like it had never been there in the first place.

And what was up with his arm? He’d gotten drenched with the ink before, sure, but never so thoroughly as to be pitch black. And his arm didn’t  _ feel _ wet, either--a little colder than usual, sure, but dry. It  _ did  _ look strangely skinny, though, and Thomas couldn’t tell where exactly the muscle he’d built over twenty years of handyman work had hidden itself.

Those alarm bells in his head were ringing a lot louder, now, but he was afraid to listen, afraid of what all this added up to. He reached his hand up to his face as he’d initially intended, tried to swipe whatever he was seeing off his face--

_ He’d felt that _ .

Not just in the palm of his hand, but elsewhere, too, in what his body was telling him was his face. But that was impossible; his face didn’t extend nearly as far out as this  _ thing _ did!

Thomas screwed his eyes shut and clutched his head in his hands as the memories came rushing back. Joey, knocking him out. Some strange ritual. The ink. Feeling like his body was melting into something new.

Was this what the ritual had done to him?

Thomas pushed himself to his feet, unsteady on legs that felt longer than he was used to, not grounded by his own familiar weight. He was in a mostly-empty room, next to a tangle of pipes (the Ink Machine’s docking station, maybe), but there was a door in front of him, and he opened it. Thomas stumbled down a maze of hallways, passing nonsensical room after nonsensical room, crates and barrels of things no animation studio should ever need, until he found a bathroom.

Thomas pushed open the door and searched for a mirror. There was one over the lone sink, cracked and stained with ink, but still usable. He rushed over to it, desperate to see what he’d become--

He startled back on instinct. The  _ thing _ in the mirror wasn’t even remotely human. Towering height, pitch-black skin and eyes, distorted paper-white face: Thomas’s mind stalled at the sight of it, unable to piece together a full picture of what that thing was, or recognize it as himself in any way.

The pieces clicked together as he forced himself to look. Wedges taken out of round eyes, pie-cut in the style of the cartoons. Long sticks for ears, bent slightly. A face that reached out and out into an impossibly long snout that ended in a huge black nose. Black skin, white face, yellow overalls, white gloves.

And he remembered the poster, the plush, the objects strewn around the circle during the ritual.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Thomas muttered.

Joey Drew had, by some trickery of hell, turned him into a cartoon wolf.

* * *

Recognizing what had happened to him and accepting it were two  _ very _ different things. Sure, he now knew that Drew had, somehow, made him into a flesh-and-blood version of the Studio’s own Boris the Wolf, but that didn't stop him from doing a double take every time he saw his own reflection, or his right hand came into view, or his own face blocked his field of vision, or he heard something through ears with better hearing than he'd ever had.

As “perfect” as Joey might have considered his new form, it was a far cry from Thomas's own body, and he was struggling to adjust.

_ I’m not gonna be stuck like this forever, anyway, _ he reassured himself.  _ If Joey did this to me, he can undo it, too. I just need to find him, and make him fix me. _

It was a hollow reassurance. After all, since when had Mister Joey Drew ever given a damn about what other people wanted? He sure hadn’t cared about whether Thomas wanted to become this  _ thing _ , and he most likely wouldn’t care that he wanted to be turned back.

A bit more tangible of a reassurance were the two parts of this godforsaken body that were at least remotely familiar: his voice and his left arm. Thomas sounded the same as he ever did, though he guessed that anyone he happened to meet would suspect him of ventriloquism before ever thinking that he  _ was _ the cartoon wolf talking to them. And his left arm, the one he’d managed to get free from the circle, still looked mostly human: it still had his hard-earned muscle build, four fingers instead of three, and skin that looked more or less like skin, if you could ignore the way his hand was corpse-white and the rest of his forearm was stained with ink. There was even a mostly-human looking scar where Joey had slashed him with the knife. It contorted to meet the thinner upper arm at the point where the circle had split it in two, looking tacked on and out of place, but it was the only familiar landmark on a body that was otherwise totally alien.

A reminder that things had been different, that  _ he _ had been different. 

And hope that maybe, just maybe, he could get back to being who he used to be.

* * *

Thomas had never really been one to watch cartoons. He didn't have a lot of spare time or money, and on the odd occasion he had an excess of both, going out to watch some drawings get into God-knows-what mischief wasn't exactly at the top of his to-do list. Thomas was a practical man above all else; there was always something better for him to do with his time.

Until now, that was.

The Studio’s basement was a nonsensical maze, hallways looping back on themselves and doors leading to nowhere, not a sign or map to be seen. It was hard to tell time down here, but Thomas was pretty sure he'd spent a solid day trying to find a path that led to stairs, an inhabited area, hell, even that blasted elevator. No such luck. He'd resorted to looking through the various items stored down here in hopes of finding one of the fire axes Joey insisted on keeping, so he could chop his way through the ceiling and climb out that way.

There were cases of bacon soup down here, just as there were all over the Studio, and Thomas almost considered eating some of them, weighing the disgusting taste of the too-thick, surely cold soup against the growing hunger in his stomach before finally deciding against it. He was a cartoon, now, somehow--with all the other ways his body was inhuman, he probably didn't  _ really _ need to eat. 

There were loads of paperwork, too, and failed animation frames halfheartedly cleaned, and spare pens and inkpots and light bulbs. There were also a few tools, which Thomas was quick to take for himself on the off chance he ever found something he could use them on.

But mostly, there were cartoons. Reels and reels of them, probably enough to fill the Ink Machine room, piled in boxes and barrels and stacks on the floor. With nothing else to do, Thomas set about finding a projector with a bulb that flickered a bit too often and setting it up to project onto one of the least ink-stained walls. He'd seen the animators and the music department using the projectors often enough while doing repairs around the Studio; he'd just never stuck around to actually watch what they were looking at. He was able to figure out how to get the projector working eventually, and the cartoon he'd picked at random was blown onto the wall. He sat down on the floor to watch.

The title card flickered into view, announcing the cartoon as “Tombstone Picnic”, and Thomas watched as Bendy came into view. Thomas recognized  _ him _ , at least, though he'd have to be blind  _ not _ to, with the way his face was plastered all over the Studio. The little devil was swinging a picnic basket in his hand, walking through a graveyard as if it was a lovely park--until he tripped over a skeleton, which burst out of the ground as if alive. 

Thomas scoffed at that. This was the kinda nonsense he’d figured was in these things.

The skeleton pulled the turf back over itself like a blanket and the scene panned left, to where a disgustingly familiar wolf was now eating Bendy’s picnic basket. As Bendy tried to reclaim his lunch, the wolf quickly sent him flying by pulling the blanket from under his feet.

_ So  _ that’s _ Boris, huh? Looks like Drew cast me as a real asshole, _ Thomas thought.  _ Not that I can fault him in that. _

Thomas was several things, but ‘agreeable’ was not one of them, and he’d had his fair share of fights with Joey Drew. He’d never particularly cared what the man thought of him, so long as the Studio didn’t fall to pieces.

Bendy snuck up behind the wolf and sprayed him with a bottle of soda, but the wolf was quickly distracted from retaliating by his damn sandwich. Bendy ran on, not knowing or caring that he wasn’t being chased anymore. Shortly after another run-in with a skeleton, the reel cut out in the middle of a scene. Must’ve been one of the cartoons the Studio hadn’t managed to finish on time, then.

Seeing the character that he now looked so much like in his original medium was… conflicting, if he had to pick a word for it. That wolf in the cartoons wasn’t Thomas, of course. He didn’t feel any real connection to it, or sympathize with it. But he recognized it, every time he looked in a mirror, every time he looked at himself.  _ That _ was what Joey Drew had tried to turn him into, and he had very nearly succeeded. 

For whatever reason, Drew had decided that Thomas _should be_ that wolf, and with nothing else to distract him, Thomas wanted to know _why._ _Why_ Drew had done this to him, _why_ he’d picked Thomas and Boris as a pair, _why_ Drew hadn’t just killed him when it didn’t work out how he’d planned.

But the cartoons didn’t have the answers. In them, Boris was usually a foil for Bendy, sometimes even without trying, a force that made the demon’s life more miserable. He was also almost constantly eating, which might at least explain the hunger Thomas had been feeling ever since he woke up like this. There was nothing else that seemed the least bit familiar, or recognizable, or even noteworthy to him. Thomas didn’t hesitate to speak up about problems he noticed, but Boris was the strong and silent type. Thomas was a practical man and avoided excess, but Boris was practically gluttony personified. Thomas was a handyman, not afraid of physical labor, but Boris was a musician, preferring to avoid anything too strenuous.

Hell, Thomas would have pegged Sammy Lawrence, the music department director, as a likelier choice than himself. The man liked music and quiet, at least. 

_ How long has it been since I’ve seen him around the Studio?  _ Thomas wondered. A chill crept up his spine at the realization that the musician hadn’t been around for a couple weeks now. For all his bitching about the Studio, Lawrence had a dedication to his work that Thomas could admire. 

Maybe Lawrence  _ was  _ Drew’s first choice, and just didn’t turn out as well as he wanted. Maybe Thomas was the second choice, or the third, or the fifth. 

The Studio had been feeling a lot emptier over the past month or so. Thomas had assumed people were being fired, what with the lack of money, or quitting from the horrible conditions, but what if that wasn't the case? What if Drew had done to them what he’d done to Thomas?

Thomas shuddered at the thought of other people being forced to go through Drew’s ritual, all while Joey Drew himself kept up the facade that everything was fine, normal at the Studio. 

And if Drew had done this to others, where were they?

Thomas stood up abruptly from his position on the floor. He'd been wasting time sitting around and watching cartoons while there were likely others that Drew had mutilated also stuck down here, and people that he would surely attempt to attack in the Studio above, blissfully unaware. Someone had to help the others stuck here. Someone had to warn the employees left.

And Thomas had always been the kind of guy to do things himself.

* * *

It felt like he wandered for days trying to find a way out of the basement. With no sun rising and setting, no employees leaving for the night, there was no way to tell. The lights down here were always on, and while he was glad enough to not be left in pitch blackness, it was frustrating to have no sign of the passing of time.

It was easy to get lost, in the endless stretches of almost-identical hallway. He doubled back on himself when long hallways led to dead ends and circled back across his path when it became impossible to remember where he'd come from. The hunger got worse, and Thomas eventually gave in and ate some of the soup lying around the basement. It didn't taste as bad as he was expecting, but maybe that was just because he was so hungry. It would taste better warm, for sure, but Thomas had no way to heat it up.

It was lonely in the basement, and he found himself missing even the most annoying members of the Studio staff. Any kind of company was better than this isolation.

Thomas was making his way down a new tangle of hallway when he heard noise coming from up ahead. It wasn't speech, not quite, but it wasn't machinery either. It was something of a cross between chattering teeth and babbling, and Thomas could picture it as the type of noise some poor soul would make when they finally went insane down here.

“Hello?” he called out. “Who's here?”

The chattering increased in volume, and Thomas followed it around a corner to find the source.

For all that Thomas's new body was despicable, he could at least tell what (or  _ who _ ) he was supposed to be. He couldn't say the same for the figure standing in the hallway in front of him.

They were short, only coming to Thomas’s waist, though that didn't exactly mean much given his own supernatural growth spurt. They had the same solid black body as Thomas, though their skin looked to be far less solid than his own, rivulets of ink constantly pouring down their form as they rocked back and forth and chattered.

As Thomas rounded the corner, they turned to see him, and he froze at what he saw.

One of the person’s eyes was pie-cut and cartoony, but the other was still clearly human, held in its socket by some kind of brace. Their mouth was crudely stitched shut, and the chatter and babble he'd heard seemed to be coming from a second mouth that split the top of their head down the middle, even now drifting open and closed and making nonsense noises. There were three arms on one side of their body, one of them looped behind their back and trapped in some kind of bulky mechanism on their other arm.

If Thomas thought he had it bad, he wasn't even in the same neighborhood as this poor bastard. 

“My name is Thomas,” he said, introducing himself, already rifling through his pockets to pull out the tools he'd managed to accumulate. “Let me give you a hand with some of that stuff, buddy.”

It was the least he could do to break off the thing trapping their arm, cut the stitches on their proper mouth. He felt like he was going to be sick, seeing what someone, probably Joey Drew, had done to them. Being dumped into the basement was seeming like less of a punishment and more of a salvation.

The figure in front of him stirred, moving closer as Thomas kept looking through his things. He was sure he'd had scissors he could use for the stitches in here somewhere, and a screwdriver--

The fist hit him in the face with such force it nearly bowled him over. Thomas reeled to get his balance as he saw the gloved fist slowly retracting back into the contraption on the toon’s hand--a spring-powered punching gauntlet, it seemed.

“What the  _ fuck _ ,” Thomas said, rubbing at his face with his flesh hand. “I'm trying to help you out; that's not any way to say thanks!”

The toon made no acknowledgement of his words, though, running forward again as if he hadn't heard Thomas at all. Thomas sighed and dodged the mechanical punch this time, grabbing ahold of the launching mechanism before it could retract and looking for a way to disassemble it.  _ Where _ was that damn screwdriver?

One of the toon’s other hands lunged out to punch at his gut, and while it wasn't as powerful as the mechanical punch, it still stung like a bitch. Startled, Thomas dropped the mechanical arm, which shot back towards the toon and immediately prepared for another punch. 

“What's your  _ problem _ , buddy?” Thomas snarled. The toon snapped his teeth together with vicious ferocity and charged forward again.

Thomas got the sinking feeling that maybe this toon had long,  _ long _ since gone off the deep end.

It moved faster than he could dodge, now, and while he was distracted with his thoughts, the thing lunged at him. Panicked, Thomas pulled out the first thing in his pocket that his gloved hand could grab and swung it at his attacker.

The toon hit the wall of the hallway with a squishy thud and didn't get up again. Thomas froze, looking helplessly back and forth between the motionless toon and the pipe wrench in his hand, dripping with ink.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked, voice soft with fear. “I didn't mean to hit you that hard, honest.”

The other toon didn't respond, even with its nonsense chatter. Had Thomas really killed it? He'd just wanted to help the poor thing, and keep it from attacking him. After all, it had been human once, like him, hadn't it?

Before Thomas could approach the toon to check its condition, the thing started melting, ink pouring off of it in globs and chunks, staining the floor black. In less than a minute, the thing was gone entirely, leaving only a puddle of ink to show it had ever existed.

“I didn't mean--I didn't want--” Thomas said, struggling to find the words. Finally he just grit his teeth. That thing had been trying to kill him, after all.

_ It was self defense, not murder _ , Thomas reassured himself.

The words felt hollow, but maybe if he repeated them enough, he might actually believe them.

* * *

He found the stairs not long after that, the door to them hastily boarded up. It was easy enough to pry the boards off, wedging his wrench behind the wood and snapping it off, and then Thomas was on his way up.

Joey Drew Studios had been built in fits and starts as the money came in and petered out again, and as such, there was no one centralized staircase or elevator or other way of navigating the floors. Well, the Ink Machine shaft, maybe, but he wasn’t about to try climbing the walls of  _ that _ .

Not when the Studio went far, far deeper than he could ever have guessed, and one misstep would mean falling all the way back to the bottom.

The stairs took him from level star (denoted by a cartoon star on the sign) to level M, to level 62, to level W/L, to levels 38 and 25, and finally to level Q before coming to an abrupt end.

_ Looks like I’ll need to find the next set to get any higher up _ , Thomas thought.  _ Maybe this floor’ll actually be populated. _

He wasn’t quite sure if that would be a good thing or a bad one. If there were people he could warn, get them out of this place before Joey got them, that was good. All the same, he wasn’t looking forward to whatever reaction people would have to him, looking the way he did now.

The floor was empty, though. There were desks spread about here and there, a projector pointed at a screen, but the place was abandoned.

As Thomas’s foot kicked against a discarded inkwell, half-full with a pen hanging out, he realized that maybe whoever had been here had left in an awful hurry. There were loose papers strewn about, sketches half-inked on them, with the ink smeared on some. A hat and satchel hung off a coathook, and a pair of shoes were tucked under a desk. A glass of water had spilled across a table. Thomas could smell blood in the air; faint, so faint he might not have smelled it as a human, but  _ there _ .

How recently had people been here? Thomas ran his finger against the ink on one of the half-finished animation cells, but his glove came away the same pristine white. Dry, then, but that didn’t exactly tell him much.

Near the door to the room, stools were toppled over. A chunk of the door frame was broken off, like someone had tried to grab it, but been pulled away. Ink dripped from the ceiling in the hallway beyond the door, pooling an inch thick, obscuring the floor. An inky handprint smeared the wall, like whoever had left it had been dragged away.

_ Joey Drew, what the hell did you do? _


End file.
